One thing lost on a lot of people was that the Oilers got Hall after being the most injured team in the previous season with 530 man-games lost to injury compared to 200-300 for the next closest team. It looked like a decision made late in the season for them.
Your Hill analysis has a problem. It's at roughly the 100 NHL starts mark that the league seems to "figure out" a new goaltender. For Hill, he hit that mark during the 2023 Cup Finals. This season, there was a slight but notable dip in performance from him. You can see how the opposite played out in NJ with Vitek Vanecek's performance hitting an accelerating decline late in 2022-23, as he hit the 100 starts mark sometime in January 2023. There's a good chance Vanecek's NHL career is likely over. Hill seems to have proven he can stick, though. The problem is figuring out how much of his performance prior to 2023-24 was attributable to this new goaltender factor as opposed to his pad colour.
White pads show puck marks the best. Puck marks show off all the saves you made. The more puck marks, the better you are. It's all about showing off if you ask me. I'm guilty myself. I loved it when my mostly white pads would get all marked up. Made me feel good and showed proof of my prowess in net.
It's all rigged anyway. How come we never see the ping-pong balls any more? In the Crosby draft, Bettman explicitly claimed, "We don't have time to conduct it here." Did you believe him the way he expects us to believe "Nobody tanks"?
The biggest issue with me in regards to the bracket is that tanking is entirely an organizational decision, not a player decision. Good luck telling your players, "Hey, I know we didn't make the playoffs but DONT worry, if we play hard enough we'll be able to get a guy who will most likely replace you!" No one would buy into it. An athletes ultimate goal is to win, they dont step out on the ice every night saying "alright boys, lets phone this one in, our GM wants the pick!" Theres an argument to be made that teams that are genuinely bad despite their best efforts deserve some help more than teams that were 🤏 this close to making the playoffs. Relegation is a good idea but its not viable right now.
When you talk about left-handed lefty players and how rare they are it really sounds true. In my entire life I've only met 1 person who was left-handed and played left. He even said when I asked that it was a mistake when he was junior (They asked him left or right and he didn't know they meant stick so he said left 'cause he's lefty and he's been stuck with left hand shot since then)
Sharks & Leafs fan here… it was so obvious Chicago tanked last year, the goalie threw a 🍕 up the middle then whiped out 😮 this year it was painful to lose by football scores to teams… if Logan doesn’t have a mystery injury all year he’s simply too good to make a complete tank, the team turned around for 5-10 games in mid-season when he came back, they had moxy/confidence so we could say “the future is bright” 🎉😊
This is a good video, but I think it does not acknowledge a harsh reality. You will never eliminate some form of tanking--if we understand it as strategic losing--completely, and I am not sure we should want to eliminate strategic losing. Tanking, or at least losing some margin of games strategically, is always going to be incentivized on some margin in any system where worse teams are given some advantage in drafting. And it is not a bad thing to give worse teams some advantage in drafting to maintain long-term competitive parity. Nobody wants to see a league where, like it was prior to the Salary Cap, only a select few teams every decade have a shot at it, or where it's like college football where the rich just always get richer. So I am fine with accepting that some level of tanking is going to occur in any system if it means better parity. There is an inherent tradeoff between draft systems that improve parity and those that eliminate incentives for tanking. That does not mean there is not room for improvement over the status quo, but I do not think a competitive playoff for draft picks would ever be introduced for one reason: the players union would view it as a non-starter. I also am not sure it would be a good idea. Sometimes, teams legitimately do become quite bad through the natural process of their core aging. This system would likely create a trap for such teams. Whereas now the worst place to be is the mushy middle, in that system it would incentivize teams to go for the mushy middle. While that is an imporvement on the status quo, it seems unrealitstic and might be too far in the respecting established talent direction. I think the Gold plan the PWHA has probably strikes the balance between parity and anti-tanking the best. Yes, it would incentivize losing early in the season, but it would make the trade deadline market far more strategically interesting (no more trading away everyone with a pulse if you are a seller), and would provide incentive not to fall below a certain floor of mediocrity else it would make winning late in the season far too hard. Also, it has the bonus of being something the PA could actually get on board with.
Just do what the Ottawa Senators or Charlotte Hornets do. Just lose all the time and nobody will accuse you of tanking. Pretty easy, I think they've got it figured out.
Honestly i don't know how you don't have much more views the video is well made and you're very well spoken at first i didn't like the idea of a 16 team first pick tournament because it gives an incentive to a mid table team to lose a couple game and smoke horrible teams to win the first pick but the bottom 8 idea is perfect imo
The Sharks did not tank. They were contenders for about two decades and did their best to keep the team competitive years past their prime (already past it the year they went to the SCF). They've had a lot of injuries and traded bad contracts and players who no longer wished to be part of the team. It was a much deserved lottery win.
Development over drafting. Very few young athletes have the skill set to be competitive in the National league at 18/19. Generally that’s what the first 3 picks guarantee. Beyond that what teams are drafting is POTENTIAL and it’s up to the organization to provide the coaching and training necessary to maximize that potential. Razor thin margins for success.
The Edmonton Oilers organization is definitely guilty of this , what was it 4 of 6 season's they scuttled the regular season to get Taylor Hall , Jordan Eberle and others and they lucked out with Golden boy McDavid drawing number 1 when the NHL started the draft lottery. Edmonton should have been disqualified from that lottery. I look forward to Edmonton's downfall in hell.
The final proposal wil have stern resistance from the national teams and the IIHF (the International Ice Hockey Federation). The IIHF World Championship is usually held around the Second Round of the Stanley Cup playoffs. This allows players from already eliminated teams to suit up for their countries and fight for the gold. If the NHL introduce a similar tournament for the bottom 16 will result a much shallower talent pool from which national team coaches can pick. And for Canada and the United States especially they will have to resort to juniors, minor leaguers and whatever journeymen they find playing in Europe. These teams will be oblitterated by the European teams like Sweden, Finland or Czechia who can easilly fill the void with players from their domestic leagues. Russia also would've been at advantage as they can rely on the KHL'ers, but as we all know - they're banned from international competition. And the it's in IIHF's best interest to have NHL players participating in the World Championship's Elite division (the IIHF's World Championship is a bit different from other sports as it employs promotion and relegation system across their 5 divisions for 9 seperate tournaments).
In the proposed bottom 16 playoffs, would the players have any motivation to try and get a player who might replace them? Is a bottom 6 guy on the 19th place team going to put any effort in to help a team he’s not personally invested in? Players would 100% rather get the time off, and this proposed system had the danger of trapping a team in last forever. Few teams will win the cup, but top prospects can make a team a contender (ex: Vancouver) which is good for the fans.
Having a tournament at the end of the season to determine who gets 1st overall is a VERY BAD idea. If I was a player on a losing team, why would I compete in order to get a player that would replace me? Also what about players who are upcoming free agents? Why would they want to help a team that they won't be on next season?
top5 pick is successful tanking. Getting a top 5 pick in a year with a player like mcdavid, or bedard just hurts so much more. because they're theoretically available to the team.
A prospect playoff doesn't really work too well, because it gives the worst teams an even lower chance of getting the top pick. You would have to be a middling team to have a chance at a generational talent. So being a fringe playoff team would be where the tanking to end the season would take place.
In 11:22 you show Chris Phillips in red, meaning that he was traded by the team that drafted him. However, he was drafted by the sens played there his whole NHL career, so I think he should be white. He played for a European team in a lockout season, but that obviously shouldn't count.
Cool video! Tanking definitely can work for some teams some times, but it's not the cure-all that some fans really seem to think it is, especially for hockey. There's a quote from an NBA exec that IIRC says "you either want to be at the very top or at the very bottom, not in between," but basketball isn't hockey. One player can't change the entire fortunes of your franchise It gets annoying having to tell my fellow Isles fans this. What the sabres are now, the Islanders used to be. They sucked in the 90s, got rid of a lot of prospects to try to "win now" in the early 2000s (while never winning a playoff series), sucked again, and are now in a period of somewhat sustained success (playoffs in last 5 of 6 years, 2 ECF trips), ironically enough, right after our 1OA left in free agency. Tanking is not a guaranteed ticket to a cup, a lot of time it's just a lot of losing and watching bad hockey, which I sure as hell don't want to do
It's not tought to get a kid to play goalie, it's tough to get their parents to buy the pads. I wanted to play goalie growing up by my dad refused to buy the pads.
I have thought so much about everything you said. Makes me more proud of the fact the Canucks have come as far as they have without tanking. Good drafting and signings and trades. Really hope we finish off the Oilers this round, otherwise it helps reinforce that all you really have to do is sit back, tank and get your McDavid's to win. It's a travesty Bedard went to the Blackhawks.
I mean from 2013 to 2019 we drafted six top ten picks in seven years. And many of those picks are our current core, so... Also the Oilers needed to basically blow three first overall picks before even they got a McDavid. Aside from a handful of sure-bit pre-draft bets, drafting is hard and you can never be sure if a player will make it or not.
It's impossible to know. The NHL has changed it's lottery format so many times now that each generation of rebuilding teams faces different rules. The Red Wings, for example, bottomed out at the worst time as far as rules were concerned.. and they paid for it. I think teams tank.. sure. But the reality is that teams go through natural cycles. A long stretch of being competitive and spending assets at the deadline and trading picks for players.. it slowly eats a hole in an organization's depth. That team's core ages, and when they retire.. said team stinks. It's not tanking when that happens.. it's the result of trying to win for a long period of time. So teams like Chicago.. they tanked. But the Sharks?? They aren't tanking, they just stink. That's why I prefer a standard draft. No gimmicks. No lottery.
The NHL needs to go back to having the lottery draw the actual picks, except make every non-playoff team should have a chance at every pick. As in, the team with the worst record could wind up with the 16th pick.
Great video but I think there's two things to address. 1) the league incentivizes this. Hard to blame the teams/GMs for not playing the current system. Fans need to vote with their dollars if they're not happy with what the team is doing. 2) some of this is a function of having 32 teams. Success rates drop precipitously each draft pick slot until you get in the teens then it's a crap shoot. Even if 12 teams per conference are duking it out for playoff spots that still leaves 8 teams who are just awful. You're punished heavily for going for a playoff spot only to miss. Doubly if you traded assets to make the push and still miss the playoffs. There's simply not enough talent to support 32 truly competitive teams. In that way the lottery is a carrot teams can Daigle to their fans while they try to figure out how to get good. I don't blame the teams so much as the league. They need to find a way to keep the product entertaining if they're going to expand. Right now if you're bad the answer seems to be tank, get very lucky with a late round pick (Pasta, Marchand, Been Kaprizov, etc but isn't every team trying to do that?), or pray you can sign a top line free agent. GMs probably feel they can realistically only effect one of those outcomes so it's the one they go for.
